Love: Our Beginning And End

February 2, 2025

Rev. Mary Erickson

Hope Lutheran Church

1 Corinthians 13:1-13; Luke 4:21-30

Love: Our Beginning and End

Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.

We’ve heard today that remarkable passage from First Corinthians 13: Paul’s hymn to love. This passage is frequently used at weddings. And it’s very appropriate for weddings, as love is in the air.

It’s a feel-good passage, one we tend to sentimentalize. But the original context of these words and Paul’s intent are far from warm and fuzzy. Corinth was a faith community divided. Some individuals were puffed up by their gifts and abilities. Other people were left feeling inferior.

In the passage just prior to this, Paul addressed the need for unity within the faith community. Together they’re like a body with many parts. The body is an integrated whole, and each member does what it was made to do.

Paul is stating that all gifts of the Holy Spirit come wrapped in the essence of the Holy Spirit, which is love. The Holy Spirit is God, and God is love. So, therefore, all gifts of the Spirit are derived from this divine love.

Greek has many different words for love. There’s eros, which is physical love; there’s philia, which is brotherly love. But the word Paul uses throughout this passage is agape. This is selfless love, the kind of love that places the welfare of the beloved before your own. This is the essence of God’s love. God’s love is directed outward. It’s fierce and unshaking in nature towards the focus of its love. And we are the fortunate objects of that love!

The faith community of Corinth had been richly blessed with gifts of the Holy Spirit. But these gifts became corrupted by human frailty. They may have the talents, but they’ve become severed from the base of agape love.

What was left, then, was something far removed from the original gift. Paul begins with the gift of language. “If I speak in the tongues of angels, but don’t have love, all I am is a noisy gong.” Noise at best! At worst, words can become a knife that gouges and destroys. Elsewhere, Paul directs us to speak the truth in love. Love builds up. It doesn’t destroy.

Sometimes the message of truth is a hard pill to swallow. Jesus came to his hometown in Nazareth. As he preached in their synagogue, he sensed that their focus was inward. They wanted him to do for them all the wonderful things he’d been doing elsewhere. He reminded them just how big God’s love is. It can’t be contained.

I had a professor at seminary who likened God’s love to atomic energy. He said, “We want to contain and control that power for our own benefit. We treat God’s love like a nuclear generator. We stick rods into it to contain and cool it. But what we need to do,” he said, “is to pull all the rods and let the thing blow!”

We like control. We don’t like powers that are greater than we are. And God’s love certainly fits the bill for that! Just let us turn on the tap a little bit, God! We’ll just pour on enough for our little community here and keep the rest in a big old reservoir for future use!

We have a hard time understanding the immensity and limitless magnitude of God’s love. We’d prefer to contain and micromanage it. The church has long done this. We want to be the dispensers of this message of salvation and grace. We want to declare who’s in and who’s out. We dole out forgiveness only when people have adequately demonstrated their contrition. We sprinkle a few drops of grace on our brows because we fear being drowned in the tidal wave of God’s goodness and mercy.

But Jesus wanted his neighbors from Nazareth to know. He wanted them to know the depth and breadth and height of God’s steadfast love. And so he told them how that love encompassed foreigners like the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian.

But they didn’t want to hear it. They wanted a smaller kind of love, one that was meant only for them.

Mark Twain once said, “It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.”

There’s something deeply offensive about God’s kind of lavish love. We prefer to operate from our base reactions. We prefer to treat others on the basis of merit or lack thereof.

The crowd at Nazareth have rejected a message of divine love. They’ve rejected love and opted for violence. They grab Jesus and haul him to a nearby cliff to hurl him over the brow.